


The Time After

by humongous_sheep



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, First Kiss, Heartbreak, Heavy Angst, It gets better I promise, Post-Canon, but lyatt happens, garcy is endgame, it don't seem like it but there WILL be a happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-28 04:23:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15040640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/humongous_sheep/pseuds/humongous_sheep
Summary: (In which Lucy ends up choosing Wyatt post-canon, only to discover the true extent to which Garcia Flynn is right for her.)"Sure, sometimes a stranger passes her on the street and she turns back to stare, only to find he looks nothing like what her imagination, for a fleeting moment, taunted her with. Sometimes she sees a book in the library and remembers reading it, and pushes back tears. Sometimes she would give anything to –It hurts too much to think about, but she always does."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please note: This is not a Lyatt fic, although the first chapter may give that impression. Things will look up for Garcy yet!

Rittenhouse goes down. Not in flames, but quietly.

It takes time. There are days when Lucy thinks all is lost, when she is cold and beat and bloody and wants nothing as much as to curl up on the floor and give in. But she doesn’t. None of them do. They keep fighting, even as the things they used to fight for shift and fade out of reach, forever, even as they realise there is no getting loved ones, however unjustly lost, back. Lucy says goodbye to Amy, forever, and she’s been gently letting herself down for as long as she can remember so it doesn’t shatter her quite as much as she expects it to. Wyatt says goodbye to Jessica, forever, and he’s already lost her twice so it burns a hole in his heart but he can take it, just one more time. Garcia Flynn says goodbye to his wife and child, forever.

They aren’t the same after that, but they have each other, and they keep fighting, until one day the smoke clears outside an abandoned industrial warehouse in 1950s Wyoming, now littered with dead bodies, and something – what, they can’t quite pin down – shifts.

It takes time to realise they’ve won, and when they do, there is no immediate reaction of joy. Nobody shouts or jumps or embraces the person standing closest to them. Wyatt puts his gun in its holster and takes off his kevlar vest, runs his fingers through his hair. Rufus pulls Jiya into a tired hug and they hold each other like that for a long time. Flynn closes his eyes for a few heartbeats, rolls up his bloody shirtsleeves, limps back into the battered wreckage of the Mothership and searches for something.

Lucy, she stands and stares, because the world seems eerily quiet, save for the intermittent creaking of a  _keep out_ sign that still hangs from a gate beam from one corner, and she is bothered by how much more triumphant she knows she  _should_ feel but doesn’t.

The journey back is a silent one. Wyatt squeezes Lucy’s hand when they settle into the Lifeboat, opposite another, and she doesn’t let go. Rufus mutters “alright” before he punches it for what may very well be the last time. Flynn is holding the journal and slowly pages through it even though his fingers leave blood and grime on the paper. He isn’t even looking; his eyes are closed, and for the moment Lucy turns to watch him, she knows he is fighting back tears, and it’s not because of his injuries. She wants to tell him he doesn’t have to fight anymore, but she finds that the words choke into silence before she can even open her mouth.

 

##

 

They never talked about what they’d do, where they’d go, when they were done with Rittenhouse. None of them had the courage to assume they’d live to see the day, and what would have been the point of torturing themselves when a month in the Bunker turned into two, into a year, into five?

Now they find themselves at a loss of words.

Slowly, Lucy begins to pack her belongings. Her books, the few clothes she has worn into threads, the mementos from all over history, from a time when it was still new and exciting to her. She is packing up the last five years of her life, she realises, and somehow this sends a shiver down her spine. All these things, they’re a reminder of what she sacrificed to save… she doesn’t even know what she has saved. Everything, maybe, or nothing.

There are many things she could feel, having completed the singular objective of her life ever since she stopped being a young professor fighting a tenure committee, but most of all Lucy feels  _hollow_. Outside of this bunker, she has nothing. No one.

She throws her bags on the ground and finds herself behind Flynn’s door. She doesn’t bother knocking.

Flynn is seated on the edge of his cot, the first thing Lucy notices is that he’s wearing his leather jacket and jeans although it’s fairly warm indoors, and there are shreds of paper scattered on the floor. In his hands, Flynn holds a pair of empty book covers, leather, monogrammed  _LP_.

Lucy stands in the doorway. Because he doesn’t look at her, not right away, she feels like she is intruding a private moment. When he does, Lucy knows he’s been crying. The creases around his bloodshot eyes are deeper than usual, and he looks  _tired_ , gray, his shoulders slumped in a way that makes him seem smaller.

He looks at her like it’s breaking his heart, Lucy thinks, and she wants to come closer. But she hasn’t been to his room since she gave him the news – nothing has been the same since she told him there would be no coming back from the dead – so she hesitates. Sits on the edge of his cot, almost gingerly.

Flynn doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything, but he watches her with that quiet intensity, lips drawn into a thin line. She settles in, close enough that her knee brushes the side of his thigh, and reaches for the emptied-out journal in his hands. She takes it from him, slowly as though he might break if she isn’t careful, runs her finger down the spine of the journal she was, in every timeline imaginable,  _supposed_ to write, and drops it on the floor among its shredded contents. Flynn swallows, and his eyes are glistening again. Lucy hesitates; she doesn’t know if she should, if she’s allowed to, but she places a hand on his arm, so lightly he might not feel it through the jacket.

He does feel it, and for a split second he tenses at her touch. Then he closes his eyes and takes a deep, if somewhat raspy, breath.

“Garcia, I’m sorry.” It’s not what Lucy meant to say, she isn’t sure she knows what she meant to say, but she damns herself over and over and can’t think of anything that wouldn’t make him hurt. She has never, not once, called him  _Garcia_.

The corner of his mouth twitches downwards, he sniffles quietly, and swallows again. A tear streaks down his cheek, onto his chin. Another. And another. Lucy wants to reach out and wipe them away, or lean into his side and empty her own eyes of tears, but she does neither of those things. She just stays, leans forward to rest her elbows on her knees, and listens, eyes closed, as he makes his peace.

It could be ten minutes, or fifteen, or an hour, when he wipes his tears on the back of his hand, which snaps Lucy out of her thoughts, and Lucy shifts, prepared to stand up, or comfort him, or say something. Anything.

He looks down at the remnants of the journal, of a future that almost existed but didn’t, and he doesn’t meet her eyes when he says her name and nothing else.

“ _Lucy_.” His voice is broken and hoarse, barely a whisper, and he draws out the  _u_ like he always has, and Lucy wants to slide her hand down his arm and touch his hands, however much blood be on them.

She doesn’t. She gets up, resting her hand on his arm for a moment longer than she has to, and doesn’t look back when she walks out the door, even with tears burning in her eyes and a lump in her throat.

Lucy doesn’t see him leave, but when Denise calls everyone in for a final briefing, he isn’t there.

She chooses Wyatt.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucy hurts, then Lucy is happy and the reader hurts.

Lucy never thought leaving the Bunker would be so hard. She  _wants_  to get out and make a new life, one where she won’t have to be alone or afraid ever again, but it’s been so long since she last entertained the idea. She doesn’t know where to begin, who to begin with.

Once again she is lost, which is why she has already raised her fist to knock on Flynn’s door – for some reason it is  _now_  that she thinks it necessary to knock – when she remembers he’s gone. The door isn’t locked, and so she ignores the pang of guilt that nearly keeps her from entering his space; Lucy’s whiskey-dulled mind notes the irony of how his door has always been open, to her anyway, yet she is only walking in when it’s too late to say… whatever it is she couldn’t say when she saw him for the last time.

Her boozy chuckle chokes into silence so very quickly.  _When she saw him for the last time_.

He hasn’t taken much with him. In fact, his room almost looks like he could come back any minute now, if Lucy didn’t know better. His things are all there.

The old computer he rescued from the hangar to tinker with – until it miraculously worked again, only to emit a cloud of blue smoke the moment Lucy stepped in, because her slamming the door shut in a bout of emotional turmoil misaligned a piece of circuitry. (He wasn’t angry, not at Lucy.) The books he’d sometimes loan to her so they could compare notes, or just sit in companionable silence and read, her on the cot and him in that tiny chair. Under the bedside table, an empty bottle of bottom-shelf vodka, the one she opened a few months ago (now they feel like years), when she’d woken up in Wyatt’s arms again with a hollow ache in her and Flynn had just listened, demanding nothing. It hadn’t been like him to demand anything. Lucy half wishes he had.

It hits her, the kind of cruel, visceral pain that always catches its prey unprepared. She doesn’t cry, she just gasps like all the air has been sucked out of the room, or like she is wearing a corset and somebody has pulled the strings too tight, too fast. It’s suddenly very cold.

Steadying herself with a hand against the wall, Lucy stumbles over to the cupboard where he kept his clothes. They’re all still here, too.

The gray turtleneck sweater she pulls over her t-shirt is soft from wear, warm, and far too big for her. The sleeves reach her knees. It smells faintly of sweat, like all the clothes in here have for an indeterminate amount of time, and it reminds Lucy of him, the evenings he’d sit on the couch with her to watch some silly old movie even though she’d inevitably have fallen asleep against his shoulder by intermission.

She lies on the cot, arms crossed on her chest, and it smells of him too. She wishes the chair by the desk wasn’t empty, that he’d have crammed his abnormally long legs into it again, and he’d be listening to her, telling her it was going to be all right, because if anybody could figure this one out, it was Lucy Preston.

Her eyes are wet, but she doesn’t cry. Just a few faint hickups.

When she finally decides to leave, her vision is so blurred by the not-quite-tears and the diminishing effects of alcohol that she almost misses it, on the corner of the desk.

His ring.

There is no note, no explanation, as if he has simply taken it off and forgotten to put it back on, like the Jessica from this timeline sometimes did with hers, except he never would, because Lucy has not a shred of doubt that it is – always has been – his most treasured possession. It hasn’t been forgotten.

Garcia Flynn left it for  _her_. Then again, who did he ever have but her?

It’s a goodbye.

 

##

Wyatt has said he loves her.

(Why does she emphasize the  _said_ every time she thinks that?)

He’s kissed her, made love to her, held her close afterwards. He’s handsome, kind, dutiful, occasionally funny, and always protective. He doesn’t want to go to war anymore, so he fixes cars. It’s easy to make a new life with Wyatt.

With several books under her name and a glowing reference, Wright State University is almost humbled to offer her a job, and she is happier than she’s ever been, although she sometimes finds it difficult to explain just how she knows the things she knows about historical events shrouded in mystery. She usually puts it down to a simple critical re-evaluation of the evidence, and her students think she’s a  _genius_. Something about that word choice, something she can’t pinpoint, always makes her melancholy.

She has no time to be melancholy.

Wyatt proposes to her in the most romantic way imaginable, takes her to a fancy restaurant, gets down on one knee at midnight and makes a speech.

 

##

 Denise walks her down the aisle. Lucy doesn’t think she’s ever looked as beautiful as she does, the sun is shining through the stained-glass windows.

The church is full, and her eyes skim over the rows of familiar faces, and she wishes Amy were here. She wishes—

 

##

The wedding presents. Lucy is struck by how many there are, by how many people can care about her all at once even after years underground, and her cheeks already hurt from smiling. Save for the car that Connor just  _had_ to bring, which is parked outside the church unless Wyatt has already taken it for a ride, the various boxes and gift bags don’t take up that much space. Most are small but beautiful things. Jiya’s card, accomppanied by two of the round, furry things from  _Star Trek_ that Lucy knows will look absolutely ridiculous on her and Wyatt’s bed but will be there anyway _,_ says “you beat me to it” – she’s still waiting for Rufus to work up the courage. New friends from work, the ones who don’t know Lucy Preston inside and out, not yet, have brought the standard fare of flowers, chocolate, alcoholic beverages and literature.

There’s one box without a sender, so Lucy saves it for last.

Inside the box is a leather-bound journal, its covers a deep shade of wine-red, the ornate initials  _LP_  pressed into the bottom left corner. Lucy takes it in her hands. It is smooth and heavy, the spine yet to be broken, and the pages are held in place by fine golden threads. She smiles when she opens it at the first page, to write her name - the first of many notes, memories, chronicling her new life as Lucy Preston-Logan, wife and mother.

But there is already something written on the first page, in a beautiful, rounded hand and black ink:

_To Lucy. Loved, always._

Lucy doesn’t know why, but she closes the journal, clutches it against her chest, and her eyes well up with tears before her face contorts in quiet sobs. She is happy. She has a family, people she’s been to hell and back with. She has the job she’s always wanted. She has no reason to be afraid. Nothing is missing.

No one.

Wyatt barges in, twirling the new car keys with a giddy expression, but his smile falters when he sees the tears on Lucy’s cheeks, and he wipes them away with his thumbs, kisses her: ”Luce, honey, you OK?”

“Just happy.” She’s put the book away. “And you’re to blame.”

This time it’s her who initiates the kiss, and it brings the familiar smirk, the one she hated when they first met, back on Wyatt’s face. “Wanna go for a ride, wife?”

“Sure thing, husband.”

 

##

For their honeymoon, they go on a road-trip through the States. Wyatt insists on being the one behind the wheel, he loves the freedom of driving under the open sky, and Lucy doesn’t mind. That way, she has more time to stare out the window and  _think._ The objective fact is that she’s almost forty. It’s almost too late to start a family, to get what she never thought she’d have a chance, or the motivation, for.

Almost, but not quite.

The burgundy journal becomes a travel log, then a sketchbook, then a baby diary. The old journal, the one Carol Preston gave her in a different life, lies untouched on the bottom of a desk drawer, under a sealed envelope that holds a well-worn silver ring. Every time Lucy sits down to work, on a lesson plan or an article or a review, and she works from home a lot more than she used to, her eyes dart to that drawer. It nags at her, claws at the back of her mind, refuses to let go.

One night in February, when Amy is (finally) asleep, Wyatt is out drinking, and Lucy is halfway through a bottle of Chardonnay, she begins to write.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An ending. Listen, this is the kind of fic you can use to validate Garcy even if they one day decide to make Lyatt canon, so hang on in there.

It is after a drunk Wyatt has yelled at her again, this time for how she went for lunch with a male colleague without asking him, and she has fled with Amy to Jiya and Rufus’ (they live alarmingly close to Silicon Valley), that Lucy calls Connor Mason. Yes, she knows it’s _bloody two in the morning_. One last trip. Denise will understand, just get the damn thing ready, Rufus can still fly.

She’s already aboard the Lifeboat, buckled in, when the implications of what she’s about to do nearly make her turn back.

Does she have it in her to give him false hope, with full foreknowledge of the consequences? To use his pain, the immeasurable, undiminishing pain of having lost all he loves in the world, and pretend she can make it go away, that there’s light at the end of the tunnel? The years spent fighting Rittenhouse, she did things she never thought she’d be capable of, and she hated herself for them, really did, but this is different. Lucy has _watched_ Flynn lose everything – even her – and now she’s to spend the rest of her life with the knowledge that it was all because of her. Somehow, the worst part is the absolute certainty that he won’t hold it against her. Not ever.

She always wondered how he could be so strong. They expected him to break, but he never did, not until Lucy held her hand on his arm in a goodbye. And there it is again, the feeling like she’s running out of air to breathe because the tightness in her sides won’t go away.

It was all because of her.

She adds a post-script.

 

##

 

Sao Paulo is a sprawling, dangerous city, and the bar doesn’t have a name. The street it’s on doesn’t have a name. So how can she find him? How does she?

He looks younger, much younger than he will in a year, when he meets a different Lucy, or in seven years, when he bids his silent farewell to a yet different Lucy, but the dark circles under his eyes give away a deep exhaustion. He has neither slept, shaved nor showered in days. There’s a gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans, the one he’s been planning to use on himself, but she shouldn’t know.

Introducing herself feels strange. It was him who knew her name first, after all. _Lucy_ , he mutters it now, softly, and it sends a pang of guilt right through her before she lies to his face and tells him there’s a way to save his wife and child. Betrays him, again, the way you can only betray someone who would trust you with _everything_.

He looks at the journal, first in disbelief, and then like he’s been handed salvation.

Lucy makes a point of being long gone before he can look at her like that, like she’s his salvation. She never knew saving someone could be the cruel thing to do.

 

##

 

She loves Amy, more than she ever thought was possible to love anything.

She doesn’t want her daughter to grow up in a fractured family, like both her and Wyatt did, so she soldiers on, until she no longer can. She blames Wyatt, his drinking and his jealousy. She also can’t help but blame herself, the way she’s grown more distant by the hour since she disappeared for two days and refused to tell him what she did, or where. He didn’t ask her _when_ , but he should have. And then there’s the small, dark part of her that wants to blame Flynn, wants to be angry at how he didn’t fight for her. Wants to, until it admits the only reason he never asked for her forgiveness, or love (she shudders when she thinks that word), is because he didn’t think he deserved either.

It’s not messy, as far as divorces go, but for weeks it drains the life out of her. She loses weight. She drinks cheap vodka – though she’s more careful with her drinking than Wyatt ever was – the only way she’s been able to for years: alone. She tries to lose the all-consuming guilt and anger in sex with someone she barely knows, but afterwards she can’t do anything but cry. Thank god Amy is still too young to understand; she misses dad, even if dad was _sick_ a lot, but she loves getting to spend the summer with aunty Jiya and Rufus. When things get better, Lucy criss-crosses Europe by rail with Denise, who is just a few years from retirement but decides to take the time to appreciate a continent she “busted her ass to save”, even if it means a month or two of unpaid leave. Museum staff let Lucy see collections she probably isn’t supposed to see, and every single time she finds herself lost in the unfamiliar sensation of looking back at something that used to be right there, within reach.

She ends up at Yale, and it’s not such a bad place to be, not when even the most mothball-scented professors worship the ground she walks on. She writes a book, her best one yet, on the socio-political consequences of the Salem witch revolt, and is working on another by the time she’s officially a New York Times bestseller. Amy, who has her father’s smile, learns to read before preschool. By all accounts, Lucy is thriving.

Sure, sometimes a stranger passes her on the street and she turns back to stare, only to find he looks nothing like what her imagination, for a fleeting moment, taunted her with. Sometimes she sees a book in the library and remembers reading it, and pushes back tears. Sometimes she would give anything to –

It hurts too much to think about, but she always does.

At some point, she’s taken to wearing Flynn’s ring on a chain around her neck, and sometimes it feels far too heavy for her to carry.

 

##

 

It’s half past seven in the morning, so Lucy is surprised, to say the least, when she rounds a corner in an otherwise dark hallway, pop quizzes and take-away coffee in hand, and notices that her classroom is lit, the coat-hangers next to it almost full. She is mildly irritated by this turn of events, because she really does need to prepare her slideshow so that the projector in this particular room won’t cut off the titles. She therefore has half a mind to storm in and evict whichever gang of undergraduates have committed a break-and-enter to do their last-minute revision, but the square little window in the door shows her just enough to know that it would, in fact, be a bad idea: a hand points at a complicated organisational flowchart of some kind, its every movement followed by row after row of blue uniform shirts, quite a few of them adorned by yellow epaulettes.

Now that she takes another look at the coats outside the room, they’re nearly all uniform, too, and not just any uniform. Police. She fiddles with her necklace, like she often does when things get on her nerves, and inches closer to the door. Muffled speech becomes intelligible:

“… and with this kind of organisation, no matter the scale or purpose, it’s important to remember that targeting any single stage of operation will be ineffective in the long term, due to –“

She almost doesn’t recognise the voice – it’s softer, clearer, years have filed away at the roughest edges of the accent – but when she does, it’s… She forgets how to breathe. Whether she’s scared out of her mind, or deliriously happy, or both, she can’t decide. Her heart keeps hammering like it might burst out of her ribcage, and so she settles next to the door and listens. Just to be sure she isn’t dreaming. Her hands tremble.

What if he hates her, blames her like she blames herself?

His hair is streaked with shades of gray, the hollows of his face seem deeper, but his smile is still there, the way it lights up his eyes through the tears, for her, and when Lucy walks in and cries into his shirt, she doesn’t need to ask to be forgiven.

For the longest time, she thought there were multiple incarnations of Lucy. Present Lucy, Journal Lucy, Wyatt’s Lucy. But, she understands now, there’s only ever been one. His Lucy.

 

##

 

They’re on the living room couch, his legs on the table, and she has curled up against him with his arms around her. Her head rests on his chest. (So warm.) She is on the verge of sleep, and he could watch anything late-night television has to offer, but he decides to be blissfully conspicuous about choosing to watch _her_.

It feels like the most natural thing in the world. It doesn’t even occur to her that it’s their first kiss, not until she has buried her fingers in the soft hair at the back of his head and pulled him in for another.

His eyes are closed when in a whisper she asks him, for the third time in thirteen years, what it is that he wants.

And he smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel there's a very distinct possibility of a smutty fourth chapter. Or maybe I'll just write cotton candy fluff for a while, because boy was this hard to write. Comment to let me know what it is that *you* want!


End file.
